Do you have a mental illness? Why some people answer yes even when they haven’t been diagnosed

Mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety disorders are becoming increasingly common, especially among humans young people. The demand for treatment is increasing and some prescriptions are also being prescribed psychiatric medications have climbed.

These rising prevalence trends are accompanied by increasing public attention to mental health conditions. Posts about mental health saturate traditional and social media. Organizations and governments are developing awareness, prevention and treatment initiatives with increasing urgency.

The growing cultural focus on mental health has clear benefits. It increases awareness, reduces stigma and encourages help-seeking.

However, there may also be costs involved. Critics are concerned social media sites breed mental illness and that ordinary unhappiness is pathologized through the overuse of diagnostic concepts and ‘talk therapy“.

British psychologist Lucy Foulkes argues that the trends for increasing attention and prevalence are linked. Her “prevalence inflation hypothesis” suggests that increasing awareness of mental illness may lead some people to inaccurately diagnose themselves when they experience relatively mild or transient problems.

Foulkes’ hypothesis holds that some people develop too broad an understanding of mental illness. Our research supports this view. In a new study we show that the concepts of mental illness have broadened in recent years – a phenomenon that we’concept creep“-and that people differ in the breadth of their concepts of mental illness.

Why do people self-diagnose as having a mental illness?

In our new studywe investigated whether people with a broad concept of mental illness are actually more likely to self-diagnose.

We defined self-diagnosis as a person’s belief that he or she has a disease, regardless of whether he or she was diagnosed by a professional or not. We judged people to have a “broad concept of mental illness” if they considered a wide variety of experiences and behaviors to be disorders, including relatively mild conditions.

We asked a nationally representative sample of 474 American adults whether they thought they had a mental disorder and whether they had been diagnosed by a health care provider. We also asked about other possible contributing factors and demographics.

Mental health conditions were common in our sample, with 42% reporting that they currently had a self-diagnosed condition, the majority of whom had been diagnosed with it by a health care provider.

Not surprisingly, the strongest predictor of reporting a diagnosis was experiencing relatively severe distress.

The second most important factor, after stress, was having a broad concept of mental illness. When their levels of anxiety were the same, people with broad concepts were significantly more likely to report a current diagnosis.

The graph below illustrates this effect. It divides the sample by level of anxiety and shows the number of people at each level reporting a current diagnosis. People with a broad understanding of mental illness (the top quarter of the sample) are shown by the dark blue line. People with limited understanding of mental illness (the bottom quarter of the sample) are shown by the light blue line. People with broad concepts were much more likely to report having a mental illness, especially if their distress was relatively high.

People with greater mental health knowledge and less stigmatizing attitudes were also more likely to report a diagnosis.

Our research revealed two interesting further findings. People who had self-diagnosed but not received a professional diagnosis tended to have broader disease concepts than those who had.

Additionally, younger and politically progressive people were more likely to report a diagnosis, which is consistent with some previous research, and had broader concepts of mental illness. Their tendency to retain these more elaborate concepts partially explained their higher diagnosis rates.

Why does it matter?

Our findings support the idea that expanded concepts of mental illness promote self-diagnosis and may therefore increase the apparent prevalence of mental illness. People who have a lower threshold for defining distress as a disorder are more likely to identify themselves as having a mental illness.

Our findings do not directly show that people with broad concepts overdiagnose, or people with narrow concepts underdiagnose. Nor do they prove that they have broad concepts causes self-diagnosis or results thereof factual increase in mental illnesses. Nevertheless, the findings raise important concerns.

First, they suggest that increasing mental health awareness may play a role come at a price. In addition to increasing mental health literacy, it can increase the likelihood that people will misidentify their problems as pathologies.

Inappropriate self-diagnosis can have adverse consequences. Diagnostic labels can become identity-defining and self-limiting as people come to believe that their problems are permanent. difficult to control aspects of who they are.

Second, unwarranted self-diagnosis can lead people experiencing relatively mild levels of stress to seek help that is unnecessary, inappropriate, and ineffective. Recent Australian research discovered that people with relatively mild complaints who received psychotherapy worsened more often than they improved.

Third, these effects may be particularly problematic for young people. They are the most likely to hold broad views about mental illness, partly as a result social media consumption, and they are experiencing mental ill health at a relatively high and increasing rate. Whether expanded concepts of illness play a role in the youth mental health crisis remains to be seen.

Ongoing cultural shifts are creating increasingly expansive definitions of mental illness. These shifts will likely bring mixed blessings. By normalizing mental illness, they can help remove its stigma. However, by pathologizing some forms of everyday suffering, they may have an unintended downside.

As we grapple with the mental health crisis, it is critical that we find ways to raise awareness of mental health issues without inadvertently increasing them.

This article is republished from The conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.